Saturday, February 28, 2015

This is your monthly required self-assessment on how things are going on your curation project. While I've been tracking your activity, I want to hear your own evaluation on the matter. For each of the three areas (Twitter, blog, online community) I'd like you to evaluate the following:

1. Requirements: Have you been doing the required activity (i.e. for the Twitter portion are you tweeting links twice a day according to the syllabus instructions?)

2. Success Stories: Did you have a tweet or a community comment go viral? Did a blog post take off and get read or shared a lot? Dive into your stats and metrics and see where you've had the most success (one hint: log in to Twitter analytics to look at tweets)

3. Areas for improvement: Where could you be doing better? What do you wish you knew more about?

Finally, some global questions:

1. I'd like you to evaluate the quality of the experience: How immersed are you in the online conversation centered around your niche area. Are you getting noticed, and are you getting replies or interactions? When you have, what kinds of things have triggered it? What can you say you've learned so far about the interconnected nature of being a community curator?

2. Hopefully you've been watching your classmates' work. Talk about something interesting one or two classmates have done this semester, either something you liked or something that gave you an idea to try yourself.

Email me your response by the end of Wednesday. I will email you Feedback when that is in.

The #JRL scavenger hunt was definitely a workout, especially at Lehigh because we live on a hill! However, as soon as I got the assignment I was able to strategize and plan out my route. I was already in class towards the bottom of campus so I tried to stop students and pop inside of buildings on my trek up. Some students were harding to apprach than others and some of them were really cooporative where as others just looked at me like I was crazy while I tried to explain the assignment. However, I ultimately met some cool new people and I'm glad this allowed us to approach people we never would have before. Seeing other people's tweets across the country was really cool too because it felt like we were all in this hunt together and our findings really varied.

The scavenger hunt was a really valuable experience because it gives you an understanding of how aware you need to be when reporting in real time. There was a lot of multitasking required and the deadline was pretty tight, so I had to make the most of my time and my knowledge of Lehigh's campus. Some of the tasks were easier to complete, while others required more thinking and creativity.

The way this was so different from live tweeting or live blogging was that we had to use more than one social media network and multiple tools to be successful. There also wasn't just one thing we were reporting on during the hunt. This activity actually reminds me more of what it would be like to cover breaking news, because you are running around trying to collect information and accurately blast it out to your followers. Although we saw our tasks ahead of time, there's still a significant amount of real-time thinking that goes into the process and I found myself running around like a crazy person trying to find a creative idea for some of the tasks.

Wednesday, February 11, 2015

This is my first time ever live blogging an event but the process was really similar to that of live tweeting. As first I was struggling with an event/TV show that related to my topic and could be live blogged about. However, when I heard that a nutritionist was coming to speak to my sorority about dieting, health, and proper nutrition I jumped at the opportunity because my blog is so health and fitness based. Live blogging our discussion felt similar to live tweeting and involves a lot of the same skills requiring me to distinguish over blogging, or posting everything that is said, with just blogging the important things as to not drive the readers crazy. I think with blogging you have a little more freedom with that concept because readers actually make the effort to visit your blog and read about the event coverage, while clogging someone's twitter feed that doesn't care about the event with a lot of tweets can get annoying. Also, I liked to keep my posts pretty short while live blogging just because its easy to write a longer paragraph onto a post, but it doesn't make the entire coverage as interesting than if you have short and important, or funny posts. I like live tweeting a lot better because I love writing and reading short and clever posts and readers can easily scroll through and follow along.

http://alivenosa.com/uncategorized/live-blog-of-natures-honey-badgers-masters-of-mayhem/
I personally enjoyed liveblogging a lot. Definitely more than live tweeting, because I didn't have to worry about having my word count constrained, or about clogging up everyone's newsfeed. I think so far storify and live blogging are my favorite tools in social media. The only thing I disliked was the lack of hashtags and tagging within my blogging. I felt a little disconnected during this approach. Overall though, I felt more comfortable with live blogging both because of the freedom of post length and the ability to add commentary to the facts.

Maybe it was the fact that I've livetweeted many times that I found liveblogging refreshing and more fun. I enjoyed being able to ramble and link as much as I wanted to without being concerned with length. I think livetweeting and liveblogging work together to teach the skill of covering an event so it's both informative but also succinct.

I'm glad that I had experience with livetweeting before liveblogging because it taught me the value of keeping it short and choosing words wisely. But now that I've gotten that down, it felt good to do some more long-form posts, even if it was maybe over 140 characters by a word or two. It was quicker to just freely type and post without playing around with phrasing, abbreviations and words.

My liveblogging experience was also better because I was doing something that other people were also watching live, as opposed to my livetweet of the album which didn't have an interactive element. I got into a conversation with a fan of the band who checked out my liveblog and was also a journalist. I got retweeted TWICE by Yahoo Music which has 144k+ followers which drove a lot of traffic to my site. I also was following the #YahooLive hashtag on TweetDeck and favorited tweets of those watching it in an attempt to get them to look at my liveblog.

I was initially expecting it to be pretty boring because it's just a concert – but the longer post format of the liveblog gave me a lot of room to inject my own voice and comment on things I don't think I could've in tweets. Plus, the band has a lot of social issues surrounding it (the lead singer is transgender) so I was able to do some research on that, provide some links and give my own opinion.

The only thing I disliked was that there's no way to engage a community on the liveblog, there's no hashtags. I wish my posts were being filtered into some larger system of everyone liveblogging on WordPress and you could track tags or something.

I had 37 posts over the course of about an hour and a half which is about par for the course for my livetweets, so I was still having the same general timing and thought process, but I just didn't feel as stressed or as rushed to get it out quickly and keep it short. I could flesh out ideas and do some research before publishing a post. It was a cool experience and a lot of fun. I was surprised by the interaction I got, I promoted with about 4-5 tweets using the hashtag and tagging Yahoo and the band which got me a lot of attention.

The live blogging process is pretty simple and fun. After
live tweeting as well, I realize that I enjoy live blogging more. Live tweeting
can be a bit difficult because most tweets can sound repetitive and at times
you question yourself whether or not your last tweet was important or not. It’s
also difficult to write what you want to say in one tweet (considering the
character max). With live blogging you don’t really have any restrictions and
you can speak your mind in more than 140 characters. Therefore, I definitely prefer
live blogging. However, out of all that we’ve done, Storify is still my
favorite! J

After finally choosing an event and going, live blogging was a pretty cool experience. I think I like it more than live tweeting because you don't have to worry about the length of the message and of crowding people's twitter feeds. I also like that you can back edit typos (which happen too often when you're typing quickly).

Although I like it more, I think it would serve well as a platform to not only report but also inject analysis or opinion to. With live tweeting, it's best if you just report facts, but with live blogging, those facts can be accompanied by this type of commentary. Besides that, they pretty much do the same thing and the medium might just be left up to personal preference in the end.

Monday, February 9, 2015

Had she worn the pink dress to the Met Ball, she would have won Best Dressed. Wrong dress for the wrong event, Brad says. #FashionPolice
— Danielle DiStefano (@daniellejdistef) February 10, 2015

“She did kill millions of ants on the way to the Grammys” @kathygriffin talks about Rita Ora.
— Danielle DiStefano (@daniellejdistef) February 10, 2015

I'm used to live tweeting at this point, and think it can be a really useful tool when many people are talking about an event on social media. In this instance, I wasn't totally interested in what I was tweeting about and it didn't have much substance, but people were definitely talking about it using the #FashionPolice hashtag. My Twitter feed was updating pretty consistently throughout, but all of the comments were from regular Twitter users, so lots of spelling/grammatical errors that I didn't want to retweet. These people probably don't have experience with live tweeting.

Anyway, I like live tweeting. I think that you have to really think about what you want to say and once you tweet it, there's no editing. It is a quick process, so doing your best to pick and choose the most important things is necessary. I struggled this time around just because I felt like there was not a lot of variation in what I was tweeting about, and I got bored with my own tweets. Had I chosen an event that was more substantial, I don't think it would have had any issues. I think I tweeted the right amount, not every single quote or thought, but the memorable stuff.

The process to live-blogging was a little easier than live-tweeting for multiple reasons. First, it was a lot easier to say what I wanted without having to worry about character count because there's no limit on a post on live-blogging. Second, this allowed me to put more of my analysis in instead of only putting in what happened. The whole process was pretty smooth though. I was able to type in some text and wait a couple minutes, then type a little more in before I officially published it. Plus, if I ever made a mistake, I can always just go back and edit it right after.

This is only the first time I've live-blogged something, but I realized very quickly how interesting of a tool it can be. Live-tweeting still has its merits, but live-blogging allows you to say so much more and not be worried about things like tiny mistakes or a word count. It makes it a lot more relaxed of an experience. I think I'll need to live-blog something a little more interesting next time to see the difference, but for now I have no preference. Live-blogging would probably be more useful where the writer wants to include a lot of opinion instead of just reporting the news. Giving basic updates of what's happening is more suited for live-tweeting in my opinion, with small pieces of analysis. I think tag-teaming an event where one person live-tweets and one person live-blogs would make a very interesting combo of content to consume. Overall, I was happy with how the experience went.

"She’s singing 'Baby come home' in a melody of tears / While the rhythm of the rain keeps time” - this is what I want #FallOutBoyABAP
— Samantha Tomaszewski (@managewski) February 9, 2015

One more song left. Twin Skeleton’s (Hotel in NYC). Is that apostrophe even grammatically correct? #FallOutBoyABAP
— Samantha Tomaszewski (@managewski) February 9, 2015

Since I've had experience with livetweeting in the past, I decided to do something a little different by livetweeting an album I hadn't listened to yet as a way of staying inside my curation project. It was fun because I could move at my own pace and come up with comments whenever they struck me instead of trying to quickly type out what someone said. I was able to google lyrics if I wanted to reference them.It wasn't as interactive. I used the hashtag that the band used to promote the album so maybe I'll get some views, but it wasn't something that anyone else was currently doing as well. So I wasn't able to retweet or interact much. I had about 35 tweets over the course of an 11 song, 40 minute album. I think it was a good balance. I also tried to incorporate some outside links and stuff regarding the album instead of just my opinion.

I used the Brown and White Sports Twitter account to live-tweet the Lehigh men's lacrosse season opener on Saturday, Feb. 7 at home.

Taylor dodges around the right side of the net and scores behind-the-back. Lehigh leads 2-0 #LEHvsMARQ
— Brown & White Sports (@SportsBW) February 7, 2015

At the end of the third quarter, Marquette leads Lehigh 7-5. Mountain Hawks lead 29-19 in shots and 23-18 in ground balls #LEHvsMARQ
— Brown & White Sports (@SportsBW) February 7, 2015

Strain passed across to Kaunas, who dodged down the left side and scored on a bounce shot. 10-9 Marquette with 1:53 left in Q4 #LEHvsMARQ
— Brown & White Sports (@SportsBW) February 7, 2015

Since I have been live-tweeting games for a little over a year now, I have gotten a lot of experience doing stuff like this. I did most of the men's lacrosse games last year and had a lot of fun with them, but it had been a while since I'd done it for a lacrosse game so I was a little rusty there.

I felt like I tweeted around the right amount of times, but it took me a bunch of times to get to this point. For lacrosse, I usually do a tweet for each goal and at the end of each quarter, but sometimes it can be hard if there isn't a lot of scoring in a quarter. For example, there was only one goal in the first quarter, so I had to come up with other things to say so I didn't go too long without tweeting. I didn't really do any retweets of other accounts since not many people were also live-tweeting the event, which happens when you cover a smaller event like this. In the future I need to do that more often though.

So I decided to live-tweet the Brown and White critique that Professor Matt Veto leads every Wedneasday at 4 p.m. As I was tweeting I realized that most of the Brown and White writers might understand what I was tweeting about, but the rest of my followers might be confused. I tried to explain things clearly and sometimes I didn't know what to tweet that would appeal to the audience. But I think I did the best I could.

I think what was hard was trying to discern what would be more important to use. And, since I did a "live event" nobody was tweeting about, it was hard because I had to tweet everything myself and there was no community which I could retweet. That being said, I think live tweeting is definitely good for events where a lot of people will tweet about and other people are interested in hearing about.

This assignment was a bit of a challenge for me. I wanted to stick to the theme of my curation assignment, but this might not have been the best idea. If there isn't a big noteworthy scientific event going on (i.e.: rocket launch, AAAS conference, nobel prize speech) it can be difficult to find something happening in real time that would be interesting to tweet about.
I decided on doing a podcast from the American Association for the Advancement of Science. It contained the latest in science news and a guest speaker on a new study and its implications. I found it difficult to live tweet, considering the amount of information being shared, and the technical nature of that information. Unlike a fun entertainment event, the podcast made me focus on the accuracy of tiny details and trying to convey them quickly and understandably to my followers.
If I live tweet again, It will definitely be for something a little less wordy and a little more friendly to being compacted for twitter.

I kind of did the process backwards, since I did my live blog assignment before my live tweet assignment. For the most part, I enjoyed live blogging. The event I decided to live-blog, a Grammys post-show video live-stream, ended up being kind of boring. The biggest challenge I encountered was not knowing how frequently to post, and how long each post should be. I also wanted to make sure that I wasn't just reporting what was happening during the show, but also incorporating some of my own thoughts/ideas on what the hosts were discussing.

I have live-tweeted events in the past, and the biggest difference to me is simply the amount of content you can include in a live blog versus live tweeting. You have craft your message a lot more concisely when live tweeting, while you can pretty much say whatever you want when live blogging. Additionally, there's the idea that you aren't filling someone's timeline with your messages when you are live blogging. I like the idea that you can promote your live blog on Twitter, and then people can choose whether or not they want to follow what you're up to. Additionally, I loved that I could quickly get posts up and then back-edit, which you can't do with Twitter.

I don't actually think I ended up having a preference for live tweeting or live blogging. Depending on what you are covering, though, I think it might be beneficial to be able to add some more content with live blogging.

Tweeting about the 2015 Grammys wasn't too difficult considering my entire newsfeed was filled with people retweeting and posting about the Grammys as well. Since this is such a popular TV event, hearing and seeing what other people were thinking and commenting made retweeting very easy. I think with live tweeting events, such as the Grammys, retweeting is very important, otherwise your own tweets becomes very repetitive. I realized that most of my tweets were very repetitive and had a similar format, such as "(Artist) presents (Award)" and "(Artist) wins (Award)." Therefore, I enjoyed seeing and retweeting from various twitter accounts like Enews and People.
I think besides tweeting the facts and outcome of each award, retweeting people's reactions was also important. There were many twitter users who tweeted about how they did or did not think certain artists should have won a specific award. It's interesting to see what people were thinking while watching the Grammys and how everyone had a different opinion. Overall, I enjoyed this assignment, but thought I could have tweeted a little bit more. The Grammys are long, almost 3 and a half hours, so it's difficult to tweet every little thing about the show! I think it would have been easier if the show wasn't as long.

I've live tweeted the show Keeping Up With The Kardashians a few times last semester and I really enjoy doing it for reality TV shows because they are really unpredictable and most of the time just ridiculous. I naturally don't tweet excessively and mostly stick to less than three tweets a day, so I found that limiting my live tweeting to only significant and relevant tweets wasn't a huge challenge. I'm very cautious of my twitter feed and try to make each tweet have a purpose and/or draws in interest. I tweeted 23 times (including 8 retweets) during the two-hour long show. My retweets came from magazine editors, an ex bachelor from a previous season, The Bachelor himself, The Bachelor twitter account, and a few other random people that were also live tweeting the show. I think that the a good balance between retweets and original posts when live tweeting is having around half of the tweets be retweets, or a little less than that. Also, I believe it's always good to have more original tweets so that your twitter followers can form their own opinions about the show and your voice while you're live tweeting.

I definitely liked liveblogging more. I think that maybe it helped that I did it after the livetweet assignment, so I was more comfortable with the concept of reporting live on an event. I also noticed that during this event, I definitely did more analysis of
what was happening, and I also focused more on restating and condensing
what the speaker said instead of always repeating her words completely
verbatim

One difference that I noted was just the feeling that I could write as much as I wanted, because I wouldn't be annoying people in my feed. Since it was on my blog, it was just psychologically reassuring to know that viewers would have to specifically want to read my posts in order to see them, versus on Twitter, my posts would come up regardless of whether viewers wanted to see those specific ones, if they followed me. So, in that regard, I definitely felt way more comfortable posting anything and everything during the event.

On the other hand, I think that livetweeting offers way more immediate interactivity. During a large or very significant event, I think that it would be better to livetweet, because then it can gain that connection and momentum that I think is unique to social media. I think that live blogging something is better when it's more reflective, concentrated to a specific community, and not of immediate importance to larger groups.

I think that I feel more comfortable liveblogging, but I want to work on feeling comfortable at livetweeting, since it's such a necessary and influential skill.

Recap:
This was extremely hard for me, because I'm not a fast typer! During interviews, I usually set up two recording devices, in case one fails, just so I don't have to rely so heavily on my lackluster typing skills. So, it was definitely a challenge to try to catch all the important quotes as he said them!

It was also a challenge to find ways to change the format of the tweets. This was the first time, outside of class, that I live-tweeted an event, so I wasn't used to that style of tweeting. Since there wasn't anyone else tweeting during this lecture, I was the only source creating tweets. I felt like I was simply quoting him and had trouble finding new ways to present the information quickly and interestingly. I think it's better to mix up the flow of information in the feed by also retweeting when possible. I think that would have definitely helped avoid repetitiveness.

I do think I tweeted a good quantity of tweets, because I had 20 tweets total in a little over an hour. Next time, I would like to slow down a little bit and do more analytical tweets. This time, I didn't process the information much, I simply reported it as fast as I could. He kept making very intense statements, so I thought it would be better to capture them than comment on them, since they kind of spoke for themselves, like the statement that Russia's the only country that could eliminate the U.S. in seconds.

Summary of upcoming deadlines and the next few classes

For the next three classes, we're going to finish with social and dive into video storytelling.

On Monday we're going to either do an introduction to video if we have class, or we'll do a Snow Day blogging event if class is canceled. For the latter, I sent an email on Saturday with instructions.

On Wednesday, we'll do the #JRLWeb scavenger hunt. Several college journalism classes all over the country will be participating with us. The assignment will be tweeted out at 10 a.m. on Wednesday.

The following week, we'll be going deep on video technique and editing

Scavenger Hunt assignment

Due by the end of the day on Feb. 14

On Wednesday, I'll tweet out the assignment to the class hashtag at 10 a.m. You'll have the entire class period to complete it. Be sure to follow the instructions completely. After you're done, there's a Storify assignment attached to the link. You'll have until Saturday to complete that one.

To turn this in: Embed your Storify on the class blog and write a 150-word recap of the experience with an original post on this blog. The goal was to connect your tweets to a common hashtag discussion, not just with classmates but with other journalism students at other schools. Reflect on that experience. What is it like to report in real time? How does it compare to livetweeting or liveblogging, or even to producing a story for the newspaper?

Video overlay assignment

This is an assignment that will take several parts:

Before class on Feb. 18:

You'll need to interview a staff member at Lehigh about their job (nobody in Coppee Hall, please). Have some questions you ask beforehand, and let them talk uninterrupted as much as possible. You need at least 3 minutes of footage

In addition to that interview, you'll need to come with about 7 minutes of action (b-roll) footage of the person you interview. Get them in a variety of shots doing a variety of things from a variety of angles.

In class on Feb. 18 we will product overlay videos during lab time, practicing editing techniques. and producing tighter, 2-minute stories. We will leave some time on Feb. 18 for watching.

By Feb. 25, you'll need to produce another overlay video. Same type of assignment, but I want you to tell a 3-minute story about a faculty member, what they teach and what their research/expertise is. You'll need to gather, edit, and upload your video by the end of the day. You should show improvement from your class-time video. Better questions that mean your voice isn't on the audio, and the speaker repeats the question as part of their answer so you don't need artificial ways of introducing the question.

For this video, I expect you to practice solid composition learned in J24 and added to in this class. Well framed shots that account for lighting and audio quality. Test your lighting and audio beforehand!

Be sure to get permission from everyone featured on camera. Very important! This is a class rule. Follow the guidelines set out in the syllabus for getting permission on camera.

I'm looking for a lot of visual variety and very little a-roll screen time (capped at 45 seconds total). Get the professor in a variety of settings - office, classroom, interacting with students. Use both scene-switching and five-shot skills to get lots of visual variety.

Get a mix of establishing shots, medium shots, and closeup shots for both b-roll and a-roll. Don't forget, zoom with your feet and pan by changing position, not moving the camera as you record! And make use of the five-shot technique

Use b-roll effectively. Use it to cover up cuts of "ums" and tangents in the interview seamlessly. Whittle the audio down to the essentials. Don't be afraid of silence.

Add music appropriate for the subject of the story.

There should be at least two sources in this video. I'd like at least one interview with someone besides the professor, such as a student.

Follow the style guide handed out in class for titling speakers, credits, and introduction title slides. All speakers should be identified with full first and last names and their position (if faculty/staff) or class year (if student).

In the editing process, you need to separate clips into discernible themes. This should emerge from your interviews, so keep the notebook handy, but you also can ask questions that try to cover different areas such as the person's work/school history, their teaching, their research, hobbies they have, what they like about Lehigh, etc. Ask several open-ended questions in these areas and you'll see you get themes emerging from interviews.

Try to think about narrative as you edit. Maybe an introduction 30 seconds about who they are and what they do, another minute or so with specifics about their work, another 30 seconds of other voices and conclusion.

To turn this in: Produce an overlay video of 2-1/2 to 3 minutes that features at least four cuts between a-roll and b-roll. Due by the start of class on Feb. 23.

Saturday, February 7, 2015

This was the first time ever using storify and I actually really enjoyed it. News breaks everyday on Twitter so it wasn't difficult to find a news story, however, I do think the challenge comes from being timely and also when you're thinking about how and where people are reacting to the news. I think storify works best for recent timely news because the story is meant to tell people's initial reactions and the news that's being broken across different media stations. If the story is as old as a week, the story maintains less significants and the reactions are older and have already been covered. It is also great for directing people to news sites where they can follow up on the news story with more information coming in and being published on the topic in the future. The only thing I didn't like with storify was the scrolling up and down the web page to get through the entire timeline. I like twitter and blogging because you can read on and click without the hassle of getting through the entire "story."

[View the story "Harper Lee's sequel creates controversy." on Storify]
I liked learning about how to make my own Storify story. However, the assignment was definitely more challenging than I thought it would be. First of all, since I chose a topic that was recent news, but not spurred on by an event it was hard to find and vary the social media that I was using. I could not even use Instagram because pictures would not have helped my topic progress.

It was also hard to keep track of how to tell the story since it has many facets that people have to consider.

I think I realized that this sort of format works better for something that a lot of people talk about and can post about in different outlets. For example, a conference where people post tweets, pictures and maybe even videos.

I really enjoyed this assignment, it gave me experience with an alternative form of storytelling that has a lot of applications in the news world. I always thought that a game would work well for this sort of assignment since it has a defined beginning, middle and end. Once the event started I began to think about what types of things would work well in the story. I thought tweets looked best, but adding some pictures and Vines definitely made it more diverse of a story.

One challenge that I faced was the lack of photos for the event. I had trouble finding images from the game on Flickr and other picture websites, so I mostly went with tweets that had pictures attached to them. It still looked fine since it blows up the picture. I think all sporting events would work well with Storify since it does have that clear timeline of events, but other news events that are ongoing may not be the best for Storify since it might take a while to have enough types of media to tell the whole story. It has to be something that is visually pleasing to people in order to be an exciting Storify.

I actually really enjoy Storify. I think it's a really interesting way where you can talk about and summarize a news story but in a creative way. I like how much freedom you have with Storify. Being able to use tweets, youtube, GIFS and links is awesome and it's so easy to use. It's a way to tell the news a fun way. For example, I love GIFS, I think they are great and I think that using them in a creative way can really spice up a Storify page.

To be honest, although there are probably some stories in which Storify does not work well, I think for the most part you could turn any article or newsworthy story into a Storify page. I chose to do my Storify on the Pepperidge Farm bagel recall because it was a simple and short story with a number of reactions from the public (also food is my curation topic). I could easily have fun when making the Storify. I think for the most part as long as you come up with a creative way to publicize the article, you can Storify most articles (even though news articles are the easiest).

Having never used Storify before, I think it is an awesome media tool that industry professionals should be using more often. I like how user-friendly it is, and I love the ability to search multiple social media sites, Youtube videos, GIFs, etc. It took me a little while to find a story that I thought fit well with the platform. A few times I realized I was looking at too general or too big of a story and needed to pare down a little bit, but there's also the challenge of finding something that generated dialogue on social media.

[View the story "Clippers point guard Chris Paul calls out female referee " on Storify]
I think Storify has a lot of potential, though, for some longer term events. I know we discussed that it is best used for news occurring within a 24-hour period, but I would be interested in experimenting with Storify for ongoing news issues. In particular, it would be interesting to explore what's been going on with ISIS, including the recent murder of the Jordanian pilot, or the American hostage that may or be not still be alive.

It was hard to vary the media that I was using. Certain events really only transpire on certain social media platforms. I had to do some searching and digging for content I usually don't interact with in order to get some variety. I did end up coming across some cool stuff, which was fun.

I thought a concert summary worked well because it was a way for those were there to relive it and those who didn't go to see what happened. It was a linear, fairly short event that wasn't too complicated to summarize. Since it's an event that people take lots of photos and videos of, there was a lot of media readily available. And since it's part of my curation project and a fairly small community, I was able to get some interaction when I shared it on social media and notified people that they were quoted in it.

This experience was definitely interesting, because it combined so many different elements of media. I think it's a great way to present information from many different sources in many different formats. Storify is probably one of the better ways to read the news, because it has something for every kind of readers: visuals, text in a social media writing style, and links to news articles as well as blogs. So, since people learn and take in information in unique ways, I think that Storify does the best job of addressing a larger percentage of the online audience than typical news stories.

I think that the biggest challenge for me with this assignment was that I expected there to be a huge discussion after the event, where I could pull multiple contrasting opinions and make my story really interesting. There definitely was not as much debate as I expected, so the Storify is mainly news agencies reporting on the talks without very much follow-up or analysis. I tried to make it a little more interesting by collecting articles and tweets from news agencies from the main countries/regions involved, so at least it would be interesting to compare how they presented the facts and what each country considered important to report on.

Summary of upcoming deadlines

For the next three classes, we're going to finish up with social and blogging basics.

On Monday we're going to talk about livetweeting and liveblogging and what they are good for, and we'll practice livetweeting that day.

On Wednesday, we'll do a brief liveblogging practice and then talk about Storify, a social media storytelling tool. In the following week after that, you'll be required to try all three to get some practice at it (and I'd encourage you to make one of these something you do with a Brown & White multimedia requirement for the first half of the semester).

The following week, we'll be doing a social media scavenger hunt with classes in other parts of the U.S. to practice live reporting.

Storify assignment

Due by the end of the day on Feb. 7

We will practice Storify on Wednesday so you get the basics. For this assignment I want you to use Storify to summarize a news event using social tools. It could be breaking news or a topic of big interest during a given news cycle.

The main criteria for what you choose is it should be something where discussion is contained to a day so you're not choosing content over the spread of a week.

I'd like you to produce this Storify within a day of the news event day. This format works well when you're using it in the moment, not way after the fact.

Requirements: Should have a healthy diversity of visual and text content, social media, blogs, and links. I don't want you to load up on one format.

Tip: You can use this for the Brown & White, but it might also be useful for your curation topic if you don't have a B&W option. It can't count as one of your two weekly posts, but it might make a nice extra post worth tweeting out.

To turn this in: Embed it on the class blog and write a 150-word recap of the experience with an original post on this blog. Once you decided on a story, what challenges did you face? What kinds of stories work well with Storify? Are there certain news stories that don't work well with this format?

Livetweet assignment

Due by the end of the day on Feb. 9

After practicing once in class, you'll need to pick an event of some sort and livetweet the experience. It could be a news event, a press conference, something on television, whatever you want. Again, if it works for a B&W coverage event, great. If not, again, maybe consider doing something in conjunction with your curation assignment.

I'd like you to pick something others are livetweeting or at least talking about. Something on TV or an event you're attending in person are obvious candidates. The reason is I'd like you to use hashtags others are using in order to participate with them, use Tweetdeck columns to monitor that discussion.

Try to retweet the obvious things others are talking about. Don't reinvent the wheel. Focus on what unique voice you can add to the discussion, retweet the rest!

One tip: warn your followers beforehand you're doing this so they don't unfollow you out of frustration. Invite them to mute you for an hour.

To turn this in: Embed three of your favorite tweets and write a 150-word recap of the experience with an original post on this blog. How hard was it to do this if you were doing it for the first time? Do you think you tweeted too much or too little? What do you think is a good balance between retweeting and original posting?

Liveblog assignment

Due by the end of the day on Feb. 11

Similar to the livetweet assignment, after practicing once in class you'll need to liveblog some sort of experience (real life or television). In this case I'm going to give you two options: liveblog it for a B&W assignment or liveblog it for your curation assignment (as stated in class, this is in addition to your regular two posts with the goal of giving you extra content). You'll need to cover whatever it is in real time.

With liveblogging, you're not worried about Twitter curation.

Create your liveblog post so that you have a URL.

Announce on Twitter you're liveblogging the event, note the time it starts, and include the link to the page.

Liveblog start to finish

If you're covering an event live, I'd like you to post two original photos during the liveblog. If you're doing something on TV, I want to see a couple links to something on the web that relate to what's going on.

After the event is over, again tweet you just liveblogged, recap any news shared, and include the link.

To turn this in: Share the link on your blog (use your HTML skills to embed it in a paragraph rather than pasting the URL!). What was the process like? Now that you've livetweeted something too, how are those two formats different? Why would you use one over the other? Do you have a preference?